The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is no more.

Overrun by politics and plagued by lawsuits, the task force was terminated by President Trump last week.

The commission was appointed in May, 2017, with a mandate to investigate “those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.”

Now “those vulnerabilities” will be investigated inside the Homeland Security Department, which operates less like a talk show and more like an episode of CSI.

Trump has been widely criticized for raising the issue — or throwing around charges, depending on your perspective — of voter fraud. Some states, including California, flatly refused to provide the president’s commission with any voter registration data to examine. Even in the states that offered some cooperation, state election officials vowed to resist the “federalization” of state voter records.

But “The Resistance” could be in for a surprise.

The U.S. Department of Justice already has authority to oversee the states’ voter registration systems under a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993: the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “Motor Voter Act.”

President Clinton was a master of “triangulating,” a political technique later defined by his pollster and consultant, Dick Morris, as the ability to find a position above and between two opposing positions.

The Clinton administration was exceptionally limber.

The two opposing positions that had to be triangulated into the Motor Voter Act were: A) Voter registration should be more accessible; and B) Voter registration should be more secure.

This was expressed in the law’s stated goal to “increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote” in federal elections by making it easier to register, and at the same time to “protect the integrity of the electoral process” by maintaining “accurate and current” registration lists. States were required to remove voters from the rolls if they moved or died, but states were prohibited from removing anyone just because they stopped voting.

Along the same lines, the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, required states to have a system to remove ineligible voters from voter lists, but prohibited states from canceling a registration “solely” for a failure to vote.

And it was up to the states to figure out how to do that without getting sued.

Ohio devised a two-part system for maintaining accurate and current voter rolls. First, election officials checked their own voter lists against the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database to find any registered voters who had moved. Then they mailed a notice to those voters. If the voters didn’t respond, they had four years to vote in any election, and if they didn’t, their registration was canceled.

The second part of Ohio’s process was designed to identify voters who moved without telling the Postal Service. Anyone who didn’t vote for a two-year period received a notice from the local election board. If the voter did not respond and did not vote in any election for the next four years, the registration was canceled.

In 2016, Ohio was sued.

Civil rights groups said the state’s system of maintaining its voter rolls was improperly and illegally canceling the registrations of voters who were inactive, but not ineligible.

Ohio argues that its system is both legal and necessary to comply with federal law. No one’s registration was canceled “solely” for a failure to vote, the state says. The registrations were canceled for failing to respond to the notice, and then failing to vote for the next four years.

Is that legal?

A federal district court said it was. Then an appeals court said it wasn’t.

The Obama administration argued that Ohio’s system was illegal. The Trump administration has taken the opposite position.

On the other hand, California is being sued for the reverse of the complaint in Ohio — for failing to maintain current and accurate voter records. Judicial Watch and Election Integrity Project California collected evidence that there are so many inactive voters on the rolls, the state has more registered voters than voting-age citizens.

That’s what triangulation gets you — a law with contradictory mandates. The U.S. Supreme Court will try to sort it out when it hears arguments in the Ohio case this week. A decision will likely be released in June. True to its triangular roots, the case will probably end up with three justices on each side.

Susan Shelley is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.

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